With constant offers of sex from gorgeous online PR media types to hanging around back stage drinking champagne with some of the planet’s biggest buzz bands, the life of a high profile music blogger really is all about living the dream isn’t it?
And a dream is all it will ever be for Breaking More Waves as we continue our existence as a small scale, independent and old-school music blog. From our basic back-in-the-day domain address and Blogspot layout template with no fancy design aesthetic, to our lack of no more than twenty words artily cool thesaurus heavy posts with accompanying blurry video. Breaking More Waves remains what it is, doing what it does, with no bigger ambitions, no plans to become a record label, no goal to become ‘a big blog’, no vision of building some sort of career or revenue from what we do here and with absolutely no desire to be in with the in crowd. We’ve said it hundreds of times before, but ‘cool’ is transient and not something we’re interested in.
Our mission is simple – to love music and write about the music we love in a style that reflects the authors personality rather than some attempt at pseudo-journalism. Hopefully you’ll share some of that love.
So let’s get metaphorically naked and go skinny dipping through a few of the musical waves that have got us a little shivery this week, in our weekly feature The Saturday Surf. There’s plenty to catch up on, but as always we’re limiting the number of tracks to a manageable handful.
Zola Jesus – Vessel
The track that a lot of the internet has gone crazy for this week is the first release from the forthcoming Zola Jesus album Conatus, due September 26. Her previous album Stridulum II was in our top ten albums of 2010 and it also featured in the UK Bloggers Top 50 albums of the year poll. Vessel is no radical departure from songs on this previous work, although it places more emphasis on mechanical rhythms – like a factory in a bad mood. UK fans can catch her this year at The Big Chill, Field Day, Bestival and End of the Road Festival.
Zola Jesus - Vessel
Babe Rainbow – Set Loose
It’s over a year since we last mentioned Babe Rainbow and his horrow-show spooked-out electronica. This new work taken from his recently released Endless Path EP on Warp is surprisingly warm, and blissful, treading along a lusher ambient path, dare we mention the word chill-wave ? Or is that now considered so geekily-limp-wristed-male-student-smoking-joints-in-his-bedroom that it would be time to shut this blog down forever?
Babe Rainbow - "Set Loose" taken from Endless Path EP - OUT NOW
Gold Panda - MPB
Further electronic wizardry comes in the form of this new tune from Breaking More Waves favourite Gold Panda, which rather like Zola Jesus has pushed the internet and Hype Machine into meltdown. As you'd expect from Gold Panda MPB displays all sorts of oddball disjointedness yet never loses flow. Roll on album number 2. Have some of it. Now.
MPB by Gold Panda
Boxes – Throw Your Stones
Delicate beats, a reference to With or Without You by U2, hints of The Postal Service and a subtle melody that decides to go a bit doo-wollop in the middle section. Throw Your Stones by London’s Boxes is more of a graceful flight on a glider with a tiny bit of turbulence thrown in than a sonic jet ride, its gently affecting turns taking on the role of an indie electro-acoustic security blanket. Repeated listens will make you feel even more comfortable and you might just want to wrap yourself up in its light musical warmth.
Boxes - Throw Your Stones
Creature - So High
This week, we’ve left our favourite till last. So High by living it up Canadian group Creature is 47% Blondie 34% Goldfrapp and 19% Donna Summer. It is also 100% amazing. They also have another song Prom Prom the chorus of which goes “It’s prom prom, you’re a lesbian,” which is probably the best or worst lyric you've ever heard depending on your perspective, until they follow it up later on the track with “She’s a lezzie, now let her be a lezzie.” You can hear that teen coming out pop-drama by clicking here.
So High - Creature
That completes this Saturday Surf. Musical skinny dipping that sets you free. Shall we do it again next week? See you down on the beach then and we’ll break some waves together.
For six years now the superbly intelligent and literate Sweeping The Nation blog has been running the UK Bloggers Album of the Year poll, with each blog submitting (or in some cases Sweeping The Nation filching) their top ten LP’s of the year for some sort of points scoring contest that smooths out any idiosyncrasies of potential and arguable ‘poor taste.' For example the Breaking More Waves choice of Ellie Goulding in the top 10 was hardly likely to be replicated by the rest of the blogosphere – mainstream commercial female fronted pop music albums have nearly always received short change in end of year polls from anything outside ‘true pop’ blogs.
The poll gives us a good aggregation of what LP’s have been collectively floating UK bloggers boats over the past 12 months. The list shows some of the differences in UK bloggers tastes to our American cousins over the pond – for example there is very little hip hop on the list – but then maybe that’s because of the sample of blogs chosen to compile the list.
From the Breaking More Waves perspective it’s also interesting to see where we fall in line with our UK music blog peer group and it seems there’s a fair degree of commonality (Ellie Goulding being an exception) with 7 of our 10 albums of the year featuring in the Top 75 and 3 of our 10 being in the Top 10. The full list of 75 albums can be found at Sweeping the Nation – the link is below. We raised a little cheer when we saw that Hurts came above Crystal Castles and Gorillaz in the poll, were a little disappointed to find that Stornoway haven’t picked up the love from bloggers that we hoped they would and are startled to see that Midlake’s preposterous sleep inducing dirge of prog-folk got any votes at all, but that is the beauty of opinion and taste.
Click here to see the top 75 albums in full from the Sweeping The Nation poll.
Here’s a summary of our top ten which we voted for with links to each individual blog, followed by a couple of tracks from Sweeping The Nation’s own number 1 album of the year (and number 10 in the poll) Romance Is Boring by Los Campesinos!
The National – High Violet – Our #1 Blogger Poll #1
We said “Subtle and perfectly executed musicianship and songs.”
Hurts – Happiness – Our #2 Blogger Poll #28
We said “In a world where 'alternative' often means recording some fuzzy guitar and wailing vocals and doing a blurred photo shoot, by doing something so uncool and opposite to what most music fans expect, Hurts are in an odd way a real alternative.”
Sleigh Bells – Treats – Our #3 Blogger Poll #8
We said “A journey of youthful noise, out on the town, with its knickers off, ready to shag against a wall.”
Caitlin Rose – Own Side Now – Our #4 Blogger Poll #12
We said “Own Side Now is rooted in tradition and is hardly ground breaking, but that doesn't matter when it’s bedecked with this much quality.”
Stornoway – Beachcomber’s Windowsill – Our #5 Blogger Poll N/A
We said “If you’re feeling bad about life this cold winter, put on Beachcomber’s Windowsill; it will warm your soul.”
Zola Jesus – Stridulum II – Our #6 Blogger Poll #39
We said “A doomsday pop record full of emotion, vulnerability and accessible songs.”
Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can – Our #7 Blogger Poll #3
We said “Musically evocative.”
Ellie Goulding – Lights – Our #8 Blogger Poll N/A
We said “Lights is a quality pop album that stands up to the weight of hype.”
Salem – King Night – Our #9 Blogger Poll N/A
We said “Like a druggy Halloween screw in a graveyard”
Perfume Genius – Learning – Our #10 Blogger Poll #36
We said “It’s the angsty, fragile and rawness of its whole that makes it such a brilliantly affecting album.”
There Are Listed Buildings by Los Campesinos!
Named after a warped Italian 70’s film, Stridulum II by Zola Jesus has an equally warped and disturbing cover – a figure covered in an oily black graphic that looks like something out of a horror film. Zola Jesus (real name Nika Rosa Danilova) has been classified by a number of writers as goth and certainly the cover image does nothing to dispel the label. Yet if you define goth as being fundamentally about internal angst and darkness then the majority of Stridulum II doesn’t fall into that category. Even although the musical backdrop may be full of ominous brooding orchestral synths, the sounds of goblins whispering in the cupboard and heart-heavy drums, Nika’s Siouxsie Sioux styled operatics often flow with warmth and love. “When you’re lost, know I’ll be around,” she intones on Trust Me, whilst on I Can’t Stand (To See You This Way) she offers the hope of “It’s not easy to fall in love, but if you’re lucky you might find someone.” There’s a lot of positive spirit lurking there.
Stridulum II is on first listen a gloomy funeral full of slow building menace, but underneath that there’s a doomsday pop record full of emotion, vulnerability and accessible songs.
Zola Jesus – possibly the only Zola to come to our attention since the politically controversial bare footed Mary Decker felling runner Zola Budd releases a new single today that follows on from her recent UK and European shows. It’s a double A-sided beast featuring a new track Poor Animal as well as I Can't Stand which is lifted from her excellent album Stridulum II. The single comes through Souterrain Transmissions and is released on 7” only as a limited edition of 500 and with special, hand-printed gatefold packaging.Starting like a rave on slow motion with slithering snakes invading the speakers Poor Animal continues the upward ascent of Zola Jesus in to ever more accessible territories. Even although Nika Rosa Danilova has tried to deflect the ‘goth’ tag that she has attracted, because of her hugely impressive vocal and general air of gloom in the music she will probably find this label around her neck for some time; but let’s forget about the genre and just enjoy the song - because ultimately that’s what counts.
Zola Jesus - Poor Animal by souterraintransmissions
The dark sound is back again. As alternative music distances itself from the fall out of landfill indie and the lightweight, shadowy corners are being explored by many.
